Dredging and drilling are both recipes for disaster

The United Kingdom stands at a crossroads. In the coming months
decisions will be made that will largely determine whether the union
continues in something like its current state, or whether the people of a
culturally distinct region with its own proud history will demand more
autonomy.

I am of course referring to the southwest of England.

While political attention is currently focused on the Scottish independence referendum, perhaps it will be the counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall (with its own Celtic heritage and independence movement)
whose people will stick two fingers up to London. Following the
government’s unique approach to flood defence and management,
significant fractions of the southwest are underwater, and the region is
currently inaccessible by mainline rail. Further heavy rain forecast
this week will only make matters worse.

Before one can comment on the wider implications of such weather
one must of course pause, genuflect and recite: ‘Weather is not climate,
it is not possible (nor desirable) to extrapolate local weather events
to the state of the global climate.’ And of course one cannot attribute
any abnormal or extreme weather to anthropogenic climate change.

Actually, no. That’s simply not true. The atrocious conditions
outside my window right now are a result of the actions that this and
previous generations have had on the Earth’s climate. How can I claim
that? The IPCC’s last report in September declared it was 95% certain
that humans have altered the Earth’s climate. Consequently any weather,
rain or shine, sun or snow occurs on the surface of a planet changed by us.

We cannot, perhaps will never, be able to conclusively say that any particular regional spell of weather would only have ever happened because of climate change. But there is increasing evidence that we should expect more extreme weather; more droughts, more floods, more intense storms.

So what we going to do about it? I want to talk about the UK, but
the themes are applicable to any country in the world. Conceptually the
problem is very simple: the flow of water from the sky to the land is
currently exceeding the flow or water from the land to the sea. Having
neither scales nor fins we humans are particularly maladapted to aquatic
conditions and so this excess water represents all manner of nuisance.

Attention is currently focused on increasing the flow of water into
the sea. It then becomes the sea’s problem, but as the water came from
there originally, balance is thereby restored. This explains recent political finger-pointing
about dredging rivers, or rather not dredging them enough. Dredging the
rivers, the reasoning goes, will increase their capacity to transport
water away. But this clamour to ‘dredge baby dredge’ is as misguided as
the clamour to ‘drill baby drill’ in the lurch towards fracking for shale gas.

In the first instance, dredging a portion of river will simply
shift the problem downstream, unless one wants to propose the
potentially terrific expense of making significant increases to total
river capacities within a water catchment area.

A more viable solution is to keep the water on the land for longer and release it gradually into rivers and so the sea. Natural processes
are very adept at this. But intensive agriculture and urbanization has
lead to a significant reduction in the amount of rain absorbed under the
surface into ground water, leaving a much greater runoff to pour into
already swollen rivers. The problem national and local government have
is that the levers they are able to pull cannot easily affect land use.
They do have budgets for dredging or building temporary levees or
repairing bridges, but these are just sticking plasters, or make the
problem worse somewhere else.

What the weather affecting the UK right now should tell us is that
we need to take urgent action not just to try and deal with its effects
as effectively as possible, but to also address the engine of their
creation. These storms are the harbingers of a new climate that we are
creating. While this is an inadvertent consequence of exploiting the
fossil fuel that power our industrialized world, we cannot plead
ignorance as we have known for many years
that burning coal, oil and gas along with land use changes and
agriculture will change the Earth’s atmosphere. Britain’s weather
storms, screams and howls. When will we listen?

James Dyke does not work for, consult to, own shares in or
receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from
this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

New Internationalist reports on issues of world poverty and inequality. We focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide in the fight for global justice. More about our work